Technology employment firm Dice recently released a report regarding IT salaries, which found only a meager 0.7 percent raise overall during 2010, up to $79,384 on average.

Despite these numbers, job titles, company size and regional markets all played factors in positions that saw better pay performance. For instance, the average earning for an IT worker at a company with more than 5,000 employees was $88,075.

Among those IT workers that saw the best performance-based salaries included workers with experience in advanced business application programming, informatica experience, those with experience in extract transform and load and in service-oriented architecture. Those workers took in between $88,075 and $101,827 annually. SOA workers were the highest compensated.

Investment in SOA has become an increasing trend during the last several months, especially prevalent among the U.S. military. Recently, the U.S. Air Force contracted Northrop Grumman to implement a SOA system for its command and control operations.